Theme: Role of the Liberal Arts in Navigating AI
Tuesday, September 8, Hicks Banquet Room
8:30am – Breakfast and gathering
9:00am – Opening remarks and land acknowledgement
9:10am – Lew Ludwig, Denison University, “Beyond the Prompt: Making AI Useful for Your Course”
11:10am – Rachel Wood, Center for Career and Professional Development, “Graduating Into an AI-Shaped World of Work”
11:30am – Babli Sinha, Director of AI and Pedagogy, “Navigating AI and the liberal arts at K”
12:00pm – Lunch (Stone Room)
1:00pm – Advising Practicum: “Tangible Tools and Techniques: New Resources for Advising Conversations”
Keynote: Beyond the Prompt: Making AI Useful for Your Course
Lew Ludwig
Abstract:
Faculty conversations about AI are often framed as a choice between embracing it and resisting it. In practice, most of us are somewhere in the middle: experimenting with AI in some parts of our work while worrying about what it may mean for student learning, assessment, and the work we value.
In this interactive session, we’ll look at what we are learning about how faculty are actually using AI and consider some practical ways to make those uses more purposeful. Then we’ll move from talking to doing. Participants will begin building a reusable course companion—a way to give an AI tool the goals, structure, assignments, and context of a particular course so that it can help with tasks such as creating practice materials, revising assignments, generating alternatives, and checking course materials without starting from scratch every time.
The goal is not to turn every faculty member into an AI enthusiast. It is to leave with a clearer sense of where these tools might genuinely support your teaching—and something concrete you can try.
Lew Ludwig is the Benjamin Barney Chair of Mathematics at Denison University and Co-Director of the GLCA Consortium for Teaching and Learning. From 2020 to 2025 he directed Denison’s Center for Learning and Teaching.
He is co-author, with Todd Zakrajsek, of The Science of Learning Meets AI: A Practical Faculty Guide (Routledge, 2026), and guest editor, with Aubrey H. Wang, of the 2026 Journal on Excellence in College Teaching special issue Reimagining Learning Outcomes Through AI-Enhanced Pedagogy. His work helps faculty and institutions meet generative AI as an opportunity for pedagogical growth, not a technology problem to manage.
He has delivered more than 70 invited keynotes, workshops, and webinars on AI in higher education, regionally, nationally, and internationally. His TEDx talk, AI: Today’s Dumbest Genius, and his There and Back Again column for the Mathematical Association of America offer faculty practical guidance that favors curiosity over fear and agency over passivity. He is a recipient of the POD Innovation Award and the Ohio MAA Distinguished Teaching Award.